own heart—­ supposing we ever get so far.  Does this mean that the poet has experienced what he depicts, that he has gone through the various situations he makes his characters traverse, and lived the whole of their inner life?  Here, too, the biographies of poets would contradict such a supposition.  How, indeed, could the same man have been Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and many others?  But then a distinction should perhaps here be made between the personality we have and all those we might have had.  Our character is the result of a choice that is continually being renewed.  There are points—­at all events there seem to be—­all along the way, where we may branch off, and we perceive many possible directions though we are unable to take more than one.  To retrace one’s steps, and follow to the end the faintly distinguishable directions, appears to be the essential element in poetic imagination.  Of course, Shakespeare was neither Macbeth, nor Hamlet, nor Othello; still, he might have been these several characters if the circumstances of the case on the one hand, and the consent of his will on the other, had caused to break out into explosive action what was nothing more than an inner prompting.  We are strangely mistaken as to the part played by poetic imagination, if we think it pieces together its heroes out of fragments filched from right and left, as though it were patching together a harlequin’s motley.  Nothing living would result from that.  Life cannot be recomposed; it can only be looked at and reproduced.  Poetic imagination is but a fuller view of reality.  If the characters created by a poet give us the impression of life, it is only because they are the poet himself,—­multiplication or division of the poet,—­the poet plumbing the depths of his own nature in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mere outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished work of art.

Altogether different is the kind of observation from which comedy springs.  It is directed outwards.  However interested a dramatist may be in the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I imagine, to the extent of trying to discover his own.  Besides, he would not find them, for we are never ridiculous except in some point that remains hidden from our own consciousness.  It is on others, then, that such observation must perforce be practised.  But it; will, for this very reason, assume a character of generality that it cannot have when we apply it to ourselves.  Settling on the surface, it will not be more than skin-deep, dealing with persons at the point at which they come into contact and become capable of resembling one another.  It will go no farther.  Even if it could, it would not desire to do so, for it would have nothing to gain in the process.